C.D. Wright in Context: Forthcoming Fall 2024
A Contemporaries at Post45 ClusterThough famously reluctant to claim membership of any single aesthetic school, C. D. Wright’s poetry remains enigmatic for most beyond her immediate circles, and has yet to be clearly situated in the history of American poetry. While gratifying, and aligned with Wright’s singular perspective, the idea that her work resists categorization flattens its sociality and the depth of both her poetics and influence—if there’s a fraught corner of American poetry, Wright’s work engages with it. We invite work for this cluster that explores and engages methods and conditions for understanding Wright’s work as such, or examines aspects of her work’s range of formal and contextual affinities, which is itself a living archive of the tides, trends, and crosscurrents of twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, from “experimental” marginality to “mainstream” popularity, the regional to the transnational, and the documentary and the narrative lyric, among others. Papers or creative multimodal responses (up to 4000 words) considered for this cluster might bring into fuller view Wright’s poetry and essays in more detailed context, but also her ongoing significance as a poet, teacher, and touchstone.
Contemporaries at Post45 provides a forum for writers to converse with one another more directly and informally than in traditional academic publications. These curated conversations, or “clusters,” range from sets of relatively autonomous short essays on a common theme to extended epistolary exchanges.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to any of the following in dialogue with Wright’s work: documentary poetics, ecopoetics, writers or scholars influenced by her work or teaching, twentieth century American poetry, international readership and reception, contemporary poetry and/or poetic forms (including the long poem, serial poems, or lyric/narrative modes), hybrid forms, regional, rural, or aesthetically-oriented poetry communities, Southern studies, carcerality, antiwar poetry, race, collaborative poetry or artistic practices, intersections of poetry and activism, or small press publishing networks. Other topics, such as reading, teaching, publishing, or editing Wright’s work, are also welcome.
Though this cluster has been regrettably delayed, it is now confirmed for publication in Fall 2024.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to direct them to Alicia Wright* at the above address.
*To the best of her knowledge, Alicia Wright is not related to C.D. Wright.